Burlington police pioneer new IT system

The Burlington Police Department was stuck using an information system that was expensive and time consuming. The department needed a change but finding a new solution that fit their needs seemed almost impossible. In the middle of this, Burlington Police Chief Mike Schirling asked a critical question: What if we built this ourselves, based on our own needs and experience?

It has led him and the rest of the criminal justice system in Vermont down a unique path.

RICH NADWORNY: What types of information are we talking about?

MICHAEL SCHIRLING: Contemporary policing involves managing information. Calls for service and crime reports come in to computer aided dispatch and records management. There is a vast amount of digital evidence that we need to enter and access — photographs to audio and video, statements, reports, and affidavits.

RN: Why did you ultimately co-develop the new system?

MS: The first thing we did was look around to see if there was anything that stood out in the marketplace that met our needs, and there wasn't. We decided to learn more about the process of agile software development so we found a Ruby on Rails developer in Colchester and hired him to train us. Through his instruction, our team created "user stories" from our various specialized groups for the way we needed the system to work.

RN: How did you find someone to build this for you?

MS: We put out two very streamlined requests in the form of an RFI and later, an RFP. The responses that came back were expensive. Some of them were as much as $3 million and required up to a three-year build period. At that point, I was thinking it probably wasn't going to work, because the risk was too high. We tried one more thing: I found a wireframing application and rapidly developed a working model based on a simple paper form called a "crime sheet." Working with the basic information that we collect on every response, coupled with the user stories and workflows that we developed, we wireframed a workflow for the software.

RN: How did the developers respond to those?

MS: We had a conference call with each of the respondents and we walked them through the wireframes. We said, "What you're proposing is too big, bulky, and expensive. Let us walk you through the simplicity we want to achieve." By the end of two weeks of conference calls, the company that ended up getting the job— CrossWind Technologies—had built a working Web prototype that we could log in and use. Once the software coding began, we brought in our team that created our user stories to do the rapid development. We found some striking parallels between the software development processes to what we do on a day-to-day basis when we're working on major cases. We have people trained to do investigative work, and they just had to translate that to an agile software development process. Once a week we had a live development call with the developers where we tested and gave feedback on the working prototypes. In the intervening week, they would push at least one update, sometimes more.

After nine months, we flipped the switch and it's been live ever since.

RN: So how much did all of this cost and who's using it?

MS: In Vermont, there are 31 police departments and over 100 public safety agencies using this system.

The total initial cost of development was about $80,000, which is about 20 percent less than the yearly licensing cost for the previous system. We've cut the time needed for staff to manage information in half.

RN: And how does it work, out in the field?

MS: This is a solution that is tailored to the 21st century: We're working toward evidence-based or data-driven policing, and data-driven decision-making. The future version of that is predictive policing - running algorithms against information to figure out where things are most likely to happen in the future.

It demonstrates that the agile development process can be a viable model for government to approach software or IT projects.

Rich Nadworny is principal at Empatico, a local innovation firm. See www.empatico.us